The year is 3524 AD. Probes from Alpha Centauri visited Old Earth for the first time since the Great Burning cut off all communication between Old Earth and the Five Extrasolar Colonies in 2519 AD. One of the items brought back from the ruins of an ancient museum is puzzlingly called Bethan's Rock. Historiologists are not sure who Bethan was and the significance of the otherwise mundane object. One theory is that Bethan is some sort of local "Influencer" (predecessor to the line of now banished Memetic Cyber-Daemons) and the rock is its real-world foci.